Slowing Down (12 page)

We did it everywhere. In the loo of a train going to Nottingham for example. When we came out there was a rather seedy middle-aged man waiting. He said he was a BR detective and was going to report us. ‘Bollocks!’ said Heather. ‘’E’s a wanker!’ and so it turned out. A ticket
inspector told us he was constantly trying this on, but it was difficult to charge him as most couples would be too embarrassed to press charges. We did see that and, while not embarrassed, felt it would waste a great deal of time.

It was in fact in a rather grand hotel in Nottingham that Heather and I experienced our most prolonged and ecstatic night of love/lust. She had brought some powdered speed and we didn’t stop until dawn. In the bed, on the carpet, in the shower – it was amazing.

She could behave badly. Once in a North London pub when John introduced me as ‘the wisest of all the entertainers – the most entertaining of all the wise men’, she, quite drunk, shouted out very loudly, ‘No ’e fuckin’ isn’t.’

She took a certain pleasure when builders on scaffolding wolf-whistled at her and sometimes asked what she was doing with an old cunt like me. ‘Is ’e very rich?’ they’d shout, or ‘Is ’e fuckin’ famous?’ Actually, for I had become much better known again since going back on the road, she said she had preferred it when she’d first seen me at the Osterley Rugger Club jazz nights and I was more obscure. She was not alone in this preference. All my partners tended to share this view. After first enjoying being in the company of a minor celeb (how I hate that silly word!), they got to dislike being ignored and pushed aside by fans or anyone else who recognized me or even
thought
they recognized me.

Heather was not a gold-digger. Her strong anti-bourgeois principles were set against chic restaurants which I rather enjoy. She’d go to the pictures but refused the theatre as ‘a bourgeois spectacle’, a view also held by André Breton, the Pope (or Saint) of surrealism. I did, however, persuade her to go to see Alan Bennett’s
Habeas Corpus
. She sat there
stony-faced until Alan, as a charlady, rushed about the set with a phantom vacuum in his hands shouting ‘Hoover! Hoover! Hoover!’ Suddenly she couldn’t stop laughing. But it didn’t mean conversion.

She was quite promiscuous, a vice I’ve always found provocative, and now and then would bring a boy or girlfriend to share our bed, although usually, I have to say, to their indifference or embarrassment.

She wasn’t greedy. In the several years we were together she allowed me to buy her a fun-fur, and a small second-hand van. She could be, and was, jealous of another girlfriend of mine who was equally jealous of her. As for me, I have never felt even a twinge of jealousy except for a comparatively short time when dumped.

A final possibly unexpected fact about Heather. She had been for a time at art school and drew and painted small watercolours that, while not outstanding, showed some talent. Her calligraphic handwriting was immaculate.

It may seem to some readers that the last episode is simply pornographic. I have no regrets about writing it, but equally I had, before I wrote it, no intention of, literally, ‘banging on’. It just took over, owing, I suspect, to my now total physical impotence, but still actively erotic imagination.

I had a dear friend, a painter called John Banting. He was both a surrealist and, for a long time, a communist, a combination that Breton refused to accept after the Soviet show trials during the thirties, let alone the murder of Trotsky, but perhaps John had resigned or no one told ‘the Pope’. He also despised high society and caricatured it brilliantly in his
Blue Book of Conversation
, yet he was, during the thirties at any rate, welcome in
haute bohème
. As a young man, broken
nose and all (perhaps especially on that account), he was madly fond of fucking, largely, but not exclusively, men. He was a great favourite among gay aristocrats, and indeed one of them left him an annual allowance on which he lived in his old age, as by that time whiskey had destroyed his ability to offer anything beyond scribbles. Earlier he had real talent, especially as a decorator, and he also painted stylized but effective portraits.

One of John’s great virtues was his faithful friendship with those once glittering figures who, in their senility, through drink and possibly drugs had become non-sortable. Bryan Howard himself was one such and so was Nancy Cunard, a hopeless wreck living in a squalid cottage in the West Country, and who I believe died in his arms.

John himself, a man without sentimentality, had moved from London in the fifties to a dusty flat in Hastings high above the sea. It was in a terrace called White Rock Gardens, but he called it Rock and Roll Gardens. It was full of tryfid-like plants which had almost taken over. Here and in the nearby local he drank an enormous quantity of whiskey, keeping pace with his final partner (as they call lovers these days), an elderly piss-artist called Jim whom I always thought was a Scot but who turned out to be an ex-Devon fisherman. He was usually remarkably silent, hence perhaps my geographical error.

John remained a surrealist in spirit. He wore at all times a pair of dark blue gymshoes with toes painted at the front end in imitation of
The Red Model
, a picture on this theme by René Magritte. I visited Rock and Roll Gardens quite often because I appeared nearby in the early seventies with a band called Brian White, at the Caravan Club at the end
of the front. John and sometimes the silent ex-fisherman usually came with me together with that great and still vastly underrated artist the late Edward Burra, who lived not far along the coast at Rye. Dusty-looking and crippled from childhood with arthritis (how did he paint those large, immaculate watercolour washes, those hallucinatory details?), he was a witty and malicious companion speaking exclusively, for he was of respectable upper-middle-class origin, in what was known in his youth in the twenties as ‘Mayfair cockney’, and made him and his friends whom I later met sound like old Edwardian tarts. He had the ability to transform anywhere he entered – a gay pub full of transvestites or, in this case, the Caravan Club – into one of his satirical paintings.

The boss of the club wore one of those evening-dress shirts with ruffles down the front edged with purple. His wife was a wonder. She complained that Biba’s, at that time a big department store in Kensington High Street, made wonderful clothes but only for the skinny young, none for what she called ‘the fuller figure’. The shoes, though, were another matter. She’d buy a dozen pairs at a time.

Burra, a keen aficionado of footwear, said to me, ‘She wants you to look at her feet, dearie – they are very small!’

Ed Burra and John used to roam Hastings Old Town together and Ed had developed an almost teenage liking for pot. Ed’s life, his foreign travel, the excessive drinking and taste for very strong spicy food were unwise, given his physical frailty, and he was sometimes quite ill, but he always seemed to recover. He and Banting used to ‘raid’ London from time to time, and once came to see me in Camden Town. On the wall of the living-room hung a large and
beautiful post-war painting of Ed’s. It was a red, erect and phallic railway cutting plunging into a tunnel in a gentle feminine Kent landscape. He never mentioned it or seemed to notice it. He hated to discuss ‘Fart’ as he called it. Yet I was very impressed when he told me that during his stay in Harlem in the twenties he had heard the great Bessie Smith – not that he expressed any great enthusiasm. He compared her to a London hostess of the time, ‘poured into a maroon dress’. He loved jazz, however, and black people too – many of them appeared in his paintings throughout his long career.

I don’t think he had any sex life, due to his physical disability and especially an enormous and rather appropriate spleen, and this helped him work and produce a formidable body of paintings and drawings. He never judged except in the case of pomposity and dictatorial behaviour. He gave me a 78 rpm vaudeville blues record which perfectly summed up his sophisticated enthusiasm for ‘doing your own thing’. It was called ‘A Green Gal Can’t Catch On’. To hear him pronounce it in his usual Mayfair cockney was a hoot.

John, on the other hand, kept his sex life going as long as he could, but when I asked him in his comparatively old age if he was still active, he sadly admitted he could no longer do it. As he put it when we passed some very beautiful hippies in the Old Town, ‘I can only fuck them with my eyes!’

Today, over twenty years later, I am forced to give the same dispiriting response.

Although he’d written to tell me he was in hospital, John hadn’t even hinted it was terminal and that he would never go back to Rock and Roll Gardens, so I didn’t go down to Hastings to see him before he died. His remarkable lesbian
lawyer, a very twenties figure, wrote to tell me he’d left everything, except for a picture to each of his executors, to the almost silent Jim. John’s executors turned out to be Roland Penrose and myself. We had long been non-speakers, but I’d always secretly liked him and we were delighted, without reproach on either side, to make it up.

Jim sat, even more silent than usual, in his chair, a half bottle of whisky (Haig) to hand, while Roland and I tore up a great many drunken scribbles which would have done John’s reputation, such as it had become, no favours, and kept everything else. Jim said nothing, but when we uncovered a rather good portrait John had painted of him as a handsome, butch young seaman (do I imagine a tattoo?) we asked him if he would like to keep it.

‘Sell everything,’ he mumbled.

In effect there was not that much to sell except, among the books, an enormous volume of black prose and poetry edited by the negrophile Nancy Cunard during the Harlem renaissance. It was not only a beautifully edited and printed book but, being rare and in this case warmly dedicated to John, extremely valuable. I was tempted but couldn’t. Even if a built-in bourgeois inhibition against stealing hadn’t prevented me, the sad stocky figure of Jim slumped in his chair, whom we had to move about like a piece of furniture, would have stopped me.

I chose two small, same-sized, rather good coloured drawings of the
Blue Book of Conversation
period, but, possibly as a symbol of our renewed friendliness, or perhaps because both his farm at Muddle’s Green and his flat in Kensington were crammed with cubist and surrealist masterpieces, Roland gave me his too. It was, as Bogart says to the
French police chief (or was it vice versa?) at the very end of
Casablanca
, ‘the start of a beautiful friendship’.

There was quite a lot of money in John’s bank account and Jim kept it there, like a squirrel, and lived off the state in an old people’s home. When he died some years later, I got a letter from Dyke and Co. telling me that Jim had left everything to my children. This surprised me and delighted them, because Jim, just before he went into the home, had played me a mean trick. A girlfriend of mine, a Courtauld graduate, had proposed we write a book on John together and she’d gone down to Hastings to do some research and, in the pub round the corner from Rock and Roll Gardens, the regulars had told her that, Roland being dead, I had personally robbed Jim of every penny John had left him. I now suppose this was because he felt nervous that the money in the bank, which he never touched, might come to the attention of the tax authorities, who’d take most of it and deprive him of his place in the old people’s home.

My girlfriend, however, was furious in my defence and, being a formidable no-holds-barred advocate, convinced them that Jim had done me an injustice.

When he died and I found out about his act of perplexing generosity (he’d never even met my children), I felt in fairness I should go down to Hastings to attend his funeral. The congregation consisted only of some staff from the hospice and myself. As is often the case, the vicar asked me, for I was early, if I could give him any personal details because he hadn’t known the deceased, the lover of Banting and Haig whisky, the hider of the nest-egg. I wasn’t much help to the vicar on this occasion.

After the bleak ceremony, the representatives of the home
asked me back for biscuits and sherry. They were a jolly lot and the place seemed to be run on admirably liberal lines. There was, for example, a smoking room and, if physically capable, the inmates could walk down the hill to a nearby pub. Of course all this permissiveness was years before Nanny Blair began to treat us as if we were all in old people’s homes ourselves – but of the old-fashioned, rule-bound, ‘matron-knows-best’ variety.

I asked about Jim. ‘No trouble at all,’ they told me. ‘But he kept himself to himself, no friends or confidants among the other old people; a loner.’ That was about what I’d have expected. I left in good spirits. This lively place seemed a great improvement on the grim names of its equivalent in pre-war Liverpool. ‘The Home for Incurables’ (Protestants), ‘The Hospice for the Dying’ (Roman Catholics).

With Heather now living in Teddington and John, Jim and Ed Burra dead, I almost decided to cut the former back down to our reproached coupling on the floor of the band’s dressing-room at Ronnie’s, and to leave out the latter trio altogether. But then I thought, this last section does at least demonstrate how us oldies bang on, leaving the main road and finding ourselves totally perplexed as to where we were originally aiming. For instance, I have several contemporaries whom I visit fairly often for a few days, like those Edwardian maiden aunts who filled their declining years with a fixed round of country-house visits. And what do we talk about?

We have two main topics: an almost competitive analysis of our individual health and its treatment (I take more pills than you do) and our erotic memories of long ago (‘Down
Mammory Lane’, as one of my old mates once described it).

I believe that the latter is not so much to try to stimulate our fading libido but to reassure us on a ‘but Jenny kissed me’ level that we were not always just ‘dirty old men’ but dirty young ones too, and to remind ourselves that some of the nice old ladies who come up to me after concerts knew us when we were young and raunchy. If we retain any sense we will avoid flirting, remembering that the very idea of randy old tortoises is repulsive to anyone we might fancy, and besides I’m completely impotent and, even if I weren’t, am sexually indifferent to those of my age group, although a few of them very occasionally indicate they might be persuaded to take up where we left off.